Oh, Colorado’s calling me
From her hillsides and her rivers and her mesas and her trees,
When blizzards snap the power lines
And all the toilets freeze
In December in the Colorado Rockies
—Colorado, by Christopher Guest, Sean Kelly and Tony Hendra, 1973
People and critters get weird around these parts come December. My old pal Hal, who ranches chickens, burros and beeves outside Weirdcliffe, claims the deer ate his Internet the other day. It seems only fair, as he’s been eating them for years, along with elk, antelope, and other four-legged neighbors, generally after shooting them first. But still, it leaves a country boy a tad isolated, especially if his TV blows up about the same time.
Meanwhile, down here in Bibleburg, our large and ferocious feline Turkish has developed a fondness for my lap, in an oddly closeted sort of fashion. If Herself is not in evidence, Turk’ will leap up on my drawing board, stalk across my closed Asus Eee PC laptop to the next table over and give me the big blue eyes until I pat my quads a couple of times. Then he hops aboard and commences to purr, knead, nap and otherwise act like an actual cat instead of a furry Edward Scissorhands.
If anyone walks into the office, of course, I am less of a love boat than a launching pad, much to the detriment of my sweat pants (and quads, or what remains of them). But that’s December in the Colorado Rockies for you.
Mad Blog Media 
Hmmm… apparently you have been accepted into the tribe. I think that with some careful observation some insights into their behavior may come to light.
Good luck, (try kevlar underroos)
Love Hal’s site, which leads to the inevitable question: why are so many good writers doing it for free, and so many hacks getting paid for it?
Between the claws in the thighs (and the leather couch, for that matter) and the sand-paper tongue that occasionally finds my shaved head at two in the morning, I keep asking myself why I volunteered for all of this?
Funny you should post those lyrics – I just dusted off my old National Lampoon “Lemmings” album so I could re-learn this song. Favorite line:”And the morning of the avalanche, the Yeti kidnapped Blanche, and took her to his home up in the Rockies”.
Steve, Hal and I both get paid (not very well) to write (not nearly often enough), but the real money (such as it is) is in editing. I help edit the VeloNews.com web site a couple days a week, and Hal does likewise for The Pueblo Chieftain. We mostly stop people from inserting parenthetical references like the three in that first sentence. Haw.
Swell, my fave’ line from that is “O, Colorado’s calling me (Hey! You!)”
Patrick,
Yeah, I kind of screwed up that analogy. The point was that this site and his site are freebies that you do for kicks, and it’s places like this that one will find some of the best work these days. Meanwhile, over at People and the New York Post, real hacks are getting steady paychecks.
For that matter, I just completed a masters in education, and I’d say that ten of my twelve professors were functionally illiterate.
Last year during my short lived stint in Denver Public Schools, I got in a bit of a jam over my unsolicited red inking of our English department’s attempt at establishing writing guidelines. Silly me, thinking that they’d appreciate the two cents of a math geek. Turns out it was received about as well as if the marine corporal at the steps of Air Force One handed the POTUS his rewrite of the upcoming state of the union address.